The Third Article of Faith – II. The Vastness of the Universe
Date Posted: September 12th, 2007
How many stars are in the universe? We can only estimate the numbers and these estimates are very conservative.
First the galaxies. There are 100 billion galaxies that are visible to us.
How many stars in each galaxy? There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy, The Milky Way. The Milky Way is a huge galaxy; but there are larger galaxies, as well as smaller ones. Therefore, we can accept the average number of stars per galaxy as 100 billion.
Source: The Physics Factbook (http://hypertextbook.com). Edited by Glenn Elert. Written by his students.
Reference for the number of galaxies in the universe:
World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago: World Book, 1997
Reference for the number of stars in The Milky Way:
Encyclopedia Britannica. Astronomy. 2000
The total number of stars can now be calculated:
100,000,000,000 galaxies x 100,000,000,000 stars in each galaxy =
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 10 thousands, billion, billion.
We call this figure 10 sextillion or 10 to the power of 21.
I stress again that this is a very conservative estimate. And these are only the stars; we cannot see the planets and their moons. The total number of stars, planets, and moons would be totally beyond comprehension. Indeed, according to the Urantia Book, only the Universal Father knows the exact number of heavenly bodies in the universe.
The next question of more immediate interest to us is how many planets are inhabited by intelligent life?
According to the Urantia Book there are 7 trillion inhabitable planets. Again this is an estimate. It is also a potential for these are the inhabitable planets and not the inhabited planets. In time those that can potentially support life will be scouted to determine their suitability.
How many harbor intelligent life? The information is not in the Book. However, we are given the grand universe number of our planet (a relative newcomer): “The grand universe number of your world, Urantia, is 5,342,482,337,666. That is the registry number on Uversa and on Paradise, your number in the catalogue of the inhabited worlds.” Note that a planet is entered in the official registry only when intelligent life arises on it. Therefore, I will make an intelligent guess and estimate the number of worlds inhabited by intelligent life as being between 5.4 to 5.5 trillion.
Since our registry number is so high, the Author of the paper [A Universal Censor hailing from Uversa] is reassuring us as to our place in the universe: “Your planet is a member of an enormous cosmos; you belong to a well-nigh infinite family of worlds, but your sphere is just as precisely administered and just as lovingly fostered as if it were the only inhabited world in all existence.”
